French drive and American sloth

Tools

The sexy, dark, and hopeful French
flick The Beat That My Heart Skipped follows in that noble cinematic
tradition of movies about people living day to day while their grand passion
remains unfulfilled. Or perhaps it doesn't count since Beat is actually just a remake. Of
an American film. This is possible evidence of Gallic absolution for the
term "freedom fries," or maybe just a harbinger that the apocalypse is 'round
the corner. The second theory seems more plausible, but at least with Beat we'll go out on a high note.

Jacques Audiard's follow-up to the
slinky thriller Read My Lips stars
the combustible Romain Duris as Thomas, a jittery 28-year-old who spends much
of his time involved in shady real estate transactions that seem to take place
only at night and incorporate satchels of rats into the business plan. During
his other waking moments Thomas menaces money out of people for his father
Robert (Niels Arestrup, in a virtuoso performance), obviously a formerly
formidable lion of a man but now a doughy, egotistical curmudgeon.

Among Thomas's thuggy business associates
is Fabrice, a married man who makes the mistake of enlisting Thomas's help in
deceiving his wife Aline, a forlorn beauty who looks like Heidi Fleiss after a
Big Mac or two. And Robert has recently hooked up with a much-younger model
(Emmanuelle Devos, from Lips) whose
motives aren't entirely clear.

Thomas's forgotten dream of becoming
a concert pianist is revived by a chance meeting with the man who guided the
career of his late mother. The transformation of the normally brash and edgy
Thomas during the conversation is palpable, and he achieves full brightness at
the mention of an audition. He's coached for this chance at a new life by
Miao-Lin, a lovely Asian musician with whom he is unable to actually
communicate because she doesn't speak French.

The clash between Thomas's brutal
reality and his artistic ambition fuels the film, but the father-son
relationship is the heart of Beat, as
Thomas and Robert brawl their way through the power struggle that occurs when
the child must begin taking care of the parent. Robert's resentment of this new
dynamic manifests itself as cruelty toward his son, and Thomas, though he loves
his dad, desperately wants out of his old lifestyle so he can realize his
goals.

Duris, with the swaggering,
hawk-faced beauty of fellow Frenchman Vincent Cassel (Ocean's Twelve), prowls through the superbly shot Beat like a nervous panther, unable to
keep still as he works to prevent his two lives from intersecting. And it's a
credit to Duris (as well as the crackerjack editing) that I remain undecided as
to whether he was playing his own piano parts.

The source material for Beat is a 1978 film by James Toback
called Fingers, which starred Harvey
Keitel in the main role. I've never seen Fingers
but I'm usually irritated by Toback's work (Two
Girls and a Guy, Black and White),
which tries really hard to push both buttons and envelopes but instead comes
across (to me, anyway) as surprisingly humdrum and waaaay misogynistic. The
female characters in Beat all suffer
from the predictable Madonna/whore complex --- except for Miao-Lin, who is an
invention for this film --- but Audiard allows them both sophistication and
humanity.

Whether Toback did the same I'm not
sure, and I don't care. I'm happy with this version.

Director
Don Roos is back in the arthouse territory of his overrated The Opposite of Sex with the intricate
ensemble piece Happy Endings --- "a comedy, sort of" --- that revolves
primarily around two women. Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is a counselor whose secret
past has made her the target of clumsy blackmail by a wannabe filmmaker looking
to use her situation for a documentary. Then there's the always-perfect Maggie
Gyllenhaal as Jude, an opportunistic torch singer who seduces her possibly gay
drummer before realizing the kid's father (Tom Arnold, whose moving work
shocked the hell out of me) is a more lucrative target. And that's just the
beginning of Endings.

The performances found in the film
are uniformly strong, especially Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) as Mamie's flummoxed stepbrother Charley.
Roos's script is dryly funny but it may be a little too clever, as the
characters' situations seemed ultra contrived. The handheld camera work really
complements the film's intimacy.

But I was able to figure out three
things as I watched the Endings: 1)
Gyllenhaal sings beautifully; 2) Arnold can actually be believable in a
romantic role; 3) Expository text on the screen --- like voiceovers --- is
tantamount to cheating and may be the sign of a lazy filmmaker.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (R),
directed by Jacques Audiard, in French with English subtitles, opens Friday,
August 12, at Little Theatres. | Happy Endings (R), directed by Don
Roos, is playing at Pittsford Plaza.

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